For enhancing a voice component within multi-channel audio signals, e.g. entertainment audio signals, different approaches are currently employed.
A simple approach for enhancing the voice component is to boost a center channel audio signal comprised by the multi-channel audio signal, or accordingly to attenuate all audio signals of other channels. This approach exploits the assumption that voice is typically panned to the center channel audio signal. However, this approach usually suffers from a low performance of voice enhancement.
A more sophisticated approach tries to analyze the audio signals of the separate channels. In this regard, information about the relationship between the center channel audio signal and the audio signals of other channels can be provided together with a stereo down-mix in order to enable voice enhancement. However, this approach cannot be applied to stereo audio signals and requires a separate voice audio channel.
A further approach to improve a level of soft voice components and to attenuate loud non-voice components within the multi-channel audio signal is dynamic range compression (DRC). Firstly, this approach comprises attenuating loud components. Then, an overall loudness level is increased, which results in a voice or dialogue boost. However, this approach does not factor the nature of the multi-channel audio signal and the modification is only pertinent with regard to the loudness level.